


we only have a moment (so make each second count)

by pseudoanalytics



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Bodhi-Centric, Character Study, Gen, Life snapshots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-25
Updated: 2017-05-25
Packaged: 2018-11-04 15:35:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10993848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pseudoanalytics/pseuds/pseudoanalytics
Summary: Bodhi's life is a collection of snapshots—some a few seconds long and some a few minutes.Each one is vital to who he is—both as a person and a memory.





	we only have a moment (so make each second count)

**Author's Note:**

> a certain bread-loving friend of mine wanted more Bodhi-centric fic...
> 
> i try my best to deliver okay

He's been alive for twenty-five standard years.

Twenty-five.

So why is it that the most important things—the real life changers—have taken only standard minutes, even seconds?

Everything is hazy. His brain can't think, can't process. It's just feedback—a primal conglomeration of the first things that come to mind and some horrible iteration of fight or flight.

Flight.

It's always been Bodhi's answer.

It's why he tried to escape into the stars by flying ships. It's why he turns and runs at the first hint of danger.

—————

He's six years old.

A horned beetle crawls across the sill of his window. It's dark red with an iridescent shell that throws the light of NaJedha's sun. Segmented legs click as they move—the insect inches along, just in reach.

He touches it—just a single finger—still sticky with his supper. A single finger tapping the dark red carapace.

The beetle screams, a shrill and pinched sound, and oozes a black goo. It burns and now Bodhi is screaming and his mother is running out of the kitchen asking what's wrong.

A fear of bugs is born.

They make him jump now. He asks Misurno, his Imperial copilot—no, Misurno is definitely the copilot, not Bodhi, what do you mean he's the copilot, whose name is on the shuttle's clearance form, it's Bodhi's not Misurno's—to kill them if he sees any.

Kill it. Release it outside. Just keep it away from him. Three seconds of watching that beetle crawl. One second to touch it. A lifetime of fear.

—————

"Hold the knife, Bodhi. Don't drop it."

He's eleven now.

His mother hands him the knife. It seems huge in his hands.

"Don't you want to surprise Mum?" she asks him.

He loves both his moms. Of course he wants to surprise Mum.

He holds the knife.

His mother peels one tight fist off the handle. She sets it on the vegetable root.

"Hold this steady."

"I can't."

"Yes, you can. Hold it steady. We're going to chop it up."

His hand shakes. The knife is too big. He can see his face reflected in the metal—all wide eyes and teeth sunk into his lip.

"I can't do it, Mother."

She sighs, but she's smiling. She takes his face into her hands.

"You don't have to, Bo. I can do it for you. It's okay. You're alright."

He starts to set down the knife.

There's a gnarled knot in the root. It's darker in color and looks like a face—the root leers at him.

You're weak, the root face says. You're too scared.

Bodhi's fist clenches, he roars a battle cry, and he slams the knife blade right through the sneer.

It glides cleanly through, and the root falls in two.

"Whoa!" his mother laughs. "There you go!"

He feels powerful again. The face is gone.

Bodhi chops the root into tiny pieces, and when they serve his mum dinner that night, he passes her a bowl of stew and says, "I cut the ingredients myself!"

"Did you?" she says, pride in her voice. "My little Bo is all grown up and cooking dinner for me!"

The joy burns in his eyes, and he starts to cry.

He can cut vegetable roots. He can do it.

—————

He knows he can do it.

He's eighteen and one hell of a pilot.

His mother taught him to fly—her goggles on his face and her voice in his ear.

He can get a perfect score on this exam. He can be a TIE pilot—maybe even make the Special Forces team.

Bodhi's slalom run was great, and his endurance run? Even better.

It's a weapon's test now.

The target lock beeps its little tune—the laser cannon is primed and ready. His fingers close around the triggers just as the target becomes visible.

It's a holo—what he has to hit—it's a holo. A holo of a family of Twi'leks, huddled together in fear.

They cringe away and Bodhi's aim snaps three degrees right.

He misses.

The family is still there, trapped in the same motions, forever cringing away from a blast that may or may not ever come.

He misses the next target, and the next. He even misses the one after that.

His scores are too low to be a TIE pilot, but his skills are too good to discard.

Bodhi is given a cargo shuttle instead.

His friends that pass into the TIE program are dead within months.

—————

"You're my only friend!" Misurno slurs.

He swings an arm around Bodhi's shoulders, jostling him.

It's his twentieth standard year alive, and Misurno took him out for drinks, except Bodhi doesn't drink, so it's just his thirty-seven year old copilot getting wasted.

Some of Bodhi's water sloshes out onto one leg of his jumpsuit. Misurno's ale splatters the other.

Misurno seems to come back to himself.

"I didn't say that. Ya never heard me say that, ya hear?" He reaches out, trajectory fuzzy with drink, and twists a fist into Bodhi's collar. "If ya ever tell anyone I said that, I'll toss ya out the airlock on our next cargo run."

"Okay," Bodhi says. He's trying to lean his face away—Misurno smells like whatever horrid concoctions this Outer Rim cantina is labeling as drinkable and sellable. "I won't ever mention it."

"You'll forget I said it at all," Misurno says, but he lets him go—reaches for his drink again and tosses half of it back.

"You never said it," Bodhi repeats.

He can't help but smile anyway. Whether or not Misurno regrets saying so, it confirms what Bodhi already knows: he has at least one friend in this galaxy.

—————

The galaxy is so vast.

The stars crinkle and warp around him at lightspeed.

He's twenty-three years old, and something is about to happen, he can feel it.

He feels it in the jolt of his ship as it drops out of hyperspace.

A rebel ship transporter has him locked into its tractor beam. It's not pulling him in, which means he should prepare for boarding.

Bodhi sprints through his ship, slamming crates of kyber crystal into hidden shafts and ducts.

He misses Misurno. Misurno could have helped.

A modified light freighter leaves the transport—it's heading for him.

Bodhi can't hide all of the shipment. He runs back to his seat and seals the door.

The cargo ship shakes when the other craft connects. Via surveillance cameras he can see a small, mismatched crew board.

A human in an olive green mask helps a Lasat move the crates he hadn't had time to hide. A man with accentuated sideburns assists in turning on each crate's antigrav. They push them onto their ship without delay.

A teenage boy walks in next. He glances around the cargo bay, then starts scaling the walls, reaching for the duct work.

Bodhi's heart is pounding.

If they find the remaining crates, if he loses an entire shipment—

The boy finds the crawl spaces. Bodhi knows he's found the rest.

He's as good as dead if the rebels take them.

The boy looks straight into one of the cameras.

"Please," Bodhi whispers, even though the rebel can't hear him. "Please don't."

The teenager hesitates, then shuts the crawl space.

The Lasat returns, and the boy shakes his head. They walk back to their ship. Bodhi is released from the tractor beam.

He hits lightspeed before the Lasat and his masked friend can get the idea to check again themselves.

—————

A Lasat has a tight grip on Bodhi's upper arms.

He's only twenty-five—he can't die like this, trying to do the right thing.

"Please! Galen Erso sent me!"

His face is crushed against matted purple fur. In some places the Lasat's lavender skin is visible. Hairless scars criss cross its arms and chest.

Bodhi twists in its grasp but to no avail.

"And why would Galen Erso send you?" it sneers.

"We met! At the Imperial installation in Eadu! I was demoted to running cargo to that facility after I lost half a shipment in a run-in with a rebel ship!"

The Lasat slams him down hard into a durasteel chair. It sends shocks up Bodhi's tailbone and into his teeth. He gasps out in pain and has to breathe to collect himself.

"He told me... If I brought this message... If I was brave enough to defect... I could help fix..."

"You can't fix anything with your lies, Imperial pilot."

Bodhi's arms and legs are strapped down. Behind the Lasat, in the darkness, a shadow moves.

"Please..." he begs. "Please, I'm telling the truth."

"He's ready," the Lasat barks over Bodhi's head.

"Good." The rasping voice of Saw Gerrara. He was supposed to be Bodhi's savior. He was supposed to be the one who helped him—who helped Galen.

The Lasat steps outside of the caged room. He locks the door behind him.

In the darkness, a metal grate lifts.

A wet, humid burst of air carries through the hallway.

Bodhi starts to pull at his restraints.

Then Bor Gullet reaches into his mind and pulls Bodhi out.

He's gone five minutes. Those five minutes are agony.

Every thought he has ever had is torn free and let to flutter to the ground like a scrap of ash from a bonfire. His thoughts smolder on the floor around him, turning from dark gray to dusty white, then crumbling into powder.

His fear is gone because he is gone.

Who is Bodhi Rook?

He doesn't exist.

Maybe he never did?

"P—t," whispers one shredded thought.

It lands but doesn't disintegrate.

"Pi—t."

He's floating—more of a presence than a being.

"Pil—t."

Pilot?

"Hey! Hey, are you the pilot?"

He grabs the thought and pulls. He pulls until the world swirls and pops, like a hundred hyperspace jumps all at once.

He pulls until he can see the man who brought Bodhi Rook back to life.

—————

Cassian Andor is twenty-six standard years of age.

Bodhi Rook is twenty-five.

They lock eyes and shake hands and then Cassian pulls on an Imperial uniform and walks away with K-2SO and Galen's daughter and Bodhi knows—he knows—he'll never see them again.

He can only sit and wait.

He dreams of success—of stealing the plans then stealing away. He dreams of escape and survival and a lifetime without threat of the Empire.

Then they need him and Bodhi stops dreaming.

He stops dreaming until a metal object clanks into the shuttle.

His leg is injured from blaster fire that caught him on his sprint back to the ship. He's tied into their communication's line. He's done his job.

There's that grenade though.

It's just sitting there, emitting its shrill sound.

It's the sound of a screaming poisonous beetle, a war cry before chopping a vegetable. It's the sound of a targeting system, the blast that killed Misurno, a crate of humming kyber crystals mined from his own home planet.

Then it explodes, and it's the sound of Bodhi's brain when Bor Gullet caressed his temples.

—————

Bodhi is still drifting.

His brain is trying its hardest to stitch itself together, but the pieces it tries to sew keep melting apart.

Melting like the metal walls of the shuttle—dripping molten globs of matter in the flames from the grenade blast.

Bodhi's mothers pick their way across the debris to reach for him. Misurno shouts for him too, telling him to hurry up and get over here.

Twenty-five standard years. That's how long he's been alive.

In the context of the galaxy? He's been alive a fraction of a second.

But those short little events—the ones that last a few seconds or even a few minutes—those are what shaped the course of his life.

So maybe, just maybe, Bodhi thinks—gazing up at the atmosphere where he hopes rebel ships are receiving the Death Star plans—those few seconds that count as his life can make a difference too.

**Author's Note:**

> i've been reading a certain book trilogy and it's affecting my — usage...


End file.
